User blog:Silver-Haired Seireitou/Sei-san's Classroom: Guide to Hakuda
Hello all, welcome to a special installment of Sei-san's Classroom! Brought to you by me, the martial artist himself, Seireitou. Today, I will be using my knowledge and experience in the martial arts to help better explain exactly what constitutes a proper use of Hakuda in the Bleachverse. In doing so, I hope to provide a useful guide to how to write a proper Hakuda user, but more importantly, how to use Hakuda, and subsequently, martial arts in a manner that will allow for a far more compelling character and an interesting story. So, without further adieu, let us dive into the martial arts. Martial Arts in Popular Culture - Sources of Inspiration Most of you who write up Hakuda techniques and battle styles for your characters often use other Manga and Anime series for inspiration. Dragon Ball Z appears to be one of the central points of interest. To a lesser degree, there is such Manga as History's Strongest Disciple Kenichi that focus even more heavily on the martial arts. However, quite surprising to many others, there are also Manga that use martial art principles in a subtle way that you might have never guessed. Can you think of one? I'll give you one example. Fullmetal Alchemist is one such Manga. I'll take this time now to go a bit in depth with some of these Manga so you'll know what to look for when coming up with new techniques, and what not to use as well. Let's start with DBZ's predecessor, Dragon Ball. For those of you unfamiliar with the series, it features central character, Son Goku, whom is a young boy of about eleven or so when he is first introduced. While inexperienced, he was trained by his grandfather, appropiately known as Grandpa Gohan, to learn the basics of combat. But later down the road, he seeks out training from the world's greatest Master of the Martial Arts, Master Roshi of the Turtle School. Now, as he trains, he finds himself doing some of the most menial sort of tasks that someone ignorant of martial arts would say "What the fuck? How is delivering milk supposed to help learn anything about anything?!" Let me give you another example of similar proportions. Everybody knows about the classical movie, The Karate Kid, right? No, not the Jaden Smith remake. The original movie with Daniel Larusso and Mr. Miyagi. "Wax on, Wax off. Painting, uuuuuup... doooown... uuuuuuup... dooooooown." The same concept existed there too. Menial tasks designed for the purpose of teaching the student something in a subtle way, only to be explained and/or determined later down the road. You can take something as simple as how you clean a table or how you put on your jacket or even pants, and turn it into a deadly fighting technique. I shit you not. The fact is, martial arts themselves were designed out of necessity; out of a need to accomplish something or to make a previously difficult action far more simple and/or rewarding. It is from that understanding that Masters are able to take even the most roundabout common action and turn it into a lesson. Hell, I don't consider myself a Master per se (since I'm one rank away from earning that title officially), but I found a way to use the Gangam Style dance as an impenetrable block. I plan to test it out when I get a chance, but anyways... Side-tracking a bit. Taekwondo, a Korean martial art, finds itself ranging back hundreds of years ago to the ancient art of Subak. The origins of the art style deal in that Korea has a very rough mountainous region. Therefore, in order to survive, the Koreans of that time developed strong legs in order to trek across their land. That is why Taekwondo, Subak's descendant, is primarily a leg-based Martial Art that deals mostly in kicks and powerful stances. Techniques of Martial Arts should be seen as a means to an end initially. You think first, what are you trying to accomplish? Do you wish to break the opponent's bones? Crush them to a bloody pulp? Or do you seek a non-violent way? Your character dislikes violence, so they wish to find a way to handle an opponent without causing any visible damage. But even so, this is due in part to the fact that the character requires some kind of way in order to handle their opponent in combat. In that, we also see that martial arts is aimed for survival. It is meant for the purpose of overcoming adversity that can't be priorly beaten. But more on this later. Let's move onto History's Strongest Disciple Kenichi. The series focuses on Kenichi Shirahama, a wimpy bitchface who can't do much else other than hide behind his large-breasted female companion. In other words, a reverse damsel in distress. But anyways, as the series progresses, he is trained by the six Masters of Ryōzanpaku to become a bonafide badass. Now, the training methods are a bit... exaggerated, but considering what kind of universe the Bleach series is in, I highly recommend those of you who wish to pursue a Hakuda approach with a character, to check out this series because I promise you will learn a great deal about Martial Arts while also gaining some inspiration for fighting techniques. Now, it isn't directly tied into HSDK, but this brings me to my next point about Martial Arts. Another source of inspiration for the Martial Arts, especially for the chinese arts, have all come from animals. It goes without saying that animals are more deadly than humans are, at least if you don't take into account weaponry like guns and whatnot. If we pit a tiger against a human, both of them are unarmed and naked, who will win? Jokes aside, it is going to be the tiger. Why? As we have progressed down the road to becoming a modern race, we have abandoned natural instincts and pursued intelligence and reason. How to kill a tiger? Use a frickin' AK-47 and be done with it. But to the tiger, it knows one thing. Prey. To them, the human they are fighting is prey. A source of nourishment that they instinctively know will allow for their continued existence. Thus, this can also be traced back to my aforementioned statement regarding the need for Martial Arts being fueled by an innate instinctive desire for survival. By observing animals and their actions in how they move (footwork), in how they act (facial expressions), in how they stalk prey (stances), and ultimately, how they finally attack their prey (techniques), Martial Artists have come up with an innumerable amount of art styles and techniques that are modeled after these observations. I will go more in depth with this once I get to the next section of this guide. Now, down to my third aforementioned example, I bring up Fullmetal Alchemist. This is a significant manga that properly reflects the principles of Martial Arts. And that is energy flow. FMA is centered around Edward Elric and his younger brother Alphonse Elric, as they pursue the secrets of Alchemy in order to restore their bodies to their original working order. Now, the act of using Alchemy in this series is done so by drawing a circle. The circle represents power. But within the circle, one draws a structural matrix that allows for the different effects that this form of Alchemy can provide. The matrix allows for the circulation of energy which will allow for transmutation to occur, among other effects. But even more so, the profound idea of this circulation deals in examining how nature behaves. An animal lives and feeds, eventually dying and providing nourishment for the ground which is, in turn, nourishment for the other creatures. And so on goes the world. "All is One and One is All." is the central theme here and is the premise behind the two brothers using Alchemy, which was taught to them by their teacher, Izumi Curtis. This brings me to the third source of inspiration. And that is nature itself. The wind, the rivers, the ocean... Everything that we can observe in nature can be used as inspiration in the Martial Arts. We can observe the motion of the waves in the ocean, the "push-pull" relationship of the moon and the earth's oceans, and transform it into a technique. Maybe even a stance that will allow for fluid motion and quick technique alteration. I've always found water to be the best symbol for martial arts. It changes shape depending on its container, just as martial arts can be used for different means in the hands of different people. It can become hard as ice, flowing as liquid, or gentle as vapor. It can be a crashing tsunami that wipes out everything in ones path or the waters of a quiet stream that circle around the rocks and other obstacles in its way instead of moving over them. By analyzing these things, we can determine what sort of natures exist in Martial Arts. In summation, the three main sources of Martial Arts are: Necessity, Animals, and Nature. And where these all find their roots will be covered in our next section, in which I shall discuss the natures, or in some cases simply nature, behind Martial Arts in their entirety. Nature(s) of Martial Arts We've covered where martial arts find their respective sources, but now it is time to examine the nature behind all martial arts. Many people believe that the difference behind the various martial arts is primarily the type of techniques they use. And this is understandable. You can see some styles, like Taekwondo and Karate, have rather linear techniques like mostly roundhouse kicks and boxing punches, whereas Baguazhang and Wing Chun have more circular movements. Upon first glance, you may think, "Wow, Wing Chun must be a far better martial art because it clearly has an innumerable amount of techniques whereas Taekwondo has just a couple boring kicks." However, you may be surprised to know that Wing Chun, for all its fancy tricks that you may see in the movies, it actually has less techniques than Taekwondo does. So much less, in fact, that Wing Chun's entire art is comprised of only about six or seven named techniques, whereas Taekwondo has about three times that. The truth of the matter is, techniques in martial arts are not meant to be studied religiously. They are footholds, a precipice for beginners, but I'll get more on this a little bit later on. What actually makes all of the thousands of arts different from one another is the method in which energy and power is applied. Martial arts is about manipulating the form of how power is expressed, that is what it means to train in the martial arts. And there are countless ways one can express their power, but for the sake of simplicity, I will only discuss the two broad natures of power expression in martial arts, of which I will try to branch off a couple of the advanced methods of power expression to connect with these two categories. Those two natures that we will examine are "Hard" and "Soft". Hard Nature Simply speaking, the Hard nature refers to direct straightforward assault. Strength is capitalized upon in order to damage the opponent directly as efficiently as possible. Just as the quickest path between any two points is a straight line, Hard nature martial arts focuses on damaging the opponent externally. A Taekwondoin's roundhouse kick aims for the opponent's leg to break the stance, a Karateka's fist thrust out to deliver a crushing blow to the opponent's chest, and so on. Hard martial arts aim to basically smash through all opposition before them, and this not only includes attacks that are being carried out but also attacks in process of forming. In other words, hard nature attacks are about disrupting an opponent's line of attack with overwhelming force. You happen to see this nature a lot in the Bleach canon, as it is most favorably used by the , but their style is not solely hard. But more on that later. Hard isn't only about offense. Hard nature can also be defensive too. Many martial arts of the hard variety, if not all of them, focus on conditioning to make their bodies as tough as possible. And in doing so, not only do their offensive strikes have incredible potential, but they can preform blocks that depend on their bodies' physical strength to resist the blow. An individual's stance in the hard martial arts must be firm and steady, like that of a mountain; immovable and resistant to all assault. When combined together, a martial artist in hard arts learns to resist an opponent's attack in the same way that they directly attempt to damage the opponent. This ties back to the idea of disrupting the opponent's flow of attack, as an opponent whose attack becomes broken by a powerful block is left off-guard as a result. Now, Hard nature is a very broad category of power expression in martial arts, and can be branched off into various different, more specific, power expressions. These are called Jīng (京, Jin; literally "Essence"), and are present in both hard and soft categories, but we'll start with hard first. Here is a couple of different methods in which power can be expressed through the hard nature: *'Crashing:' It is the most basic of hard style, referring to the impact of the martial artist's attack to the target. Damage is done to the initial point of contact, like a massive object colliding with another object, a fist thrust out and striking one's chest... you get the gist. *'Penetrating:' The martial artist projects their force through a medium rather than damaging the point of initial physical contact. is a perfect example of this. Force is projected through the medium, such as the opponent's body, and causes internal damage. Because of this, many believe it is a soft-nature method of power expression, but even though it is causing internal damage, the essence of force behind it is linear and aimed at dealing efficient damage using the martial artist's own strength as key. *'Explosive:' Similar to crashing, but significantly different. Damage to the initial point of contact, like in crashing, but it isn't about collision. Power is aggressively unleashed onto the target, causing the explosive-like effect, which can actually span out and do even more damage. However, unlike crashing, this can be used in a passive manner as well. A mere tap can passively transmit the explosive direction of force. would be an example of this. Soft Nature Obey, Stray, and Leave: From Practitioner to Master